In this, her second book, Catherine Black weaves together the wonder, heartache, and ''unlovely beauty'' of a youth that is by turns charmed and disquieting. Straddling genres of memoir, prose, and poetry, A Hard Gold Thread delights in the layering of keenly observed moments, in the subtle play of remembering and forgetting, and in the shift in perspective brought to bear on memory as it is transmuted by time. Reverent, sensitively rendered, and sometimes tongue in cheek, A Hard Gold Thread is an unconventional memoir inviting the reader into a meditation on the engulfing beauty of the world and the compulsion to turn away from it.

In this, her second book, Catherine Black weaves together the wonder, heartache, and ''unlovely beauty'' of a youth that is by turns charmed and disquieting. Straddling genres of memoir, prose, and poetry, A Hard Gold Thread delights in the layering of keenly observed moments, in the subtle play of remembering and forgetting, and in the shift in perspective brought to bear on memory as it is transmuted by time. Reverent, sensitively rendered, and sometimes tongue in cheek, A Hard Gold Thread is an unconventional memoir inviting the reader into a meditation on the engulfing beauty of the world and the compulsion to turn away from it.